ReactJS

ReactJS is a tool that was created and maintained by Facebook. They use it in many of their own projects and it has been around since about mid-2013. It’s a very popular and fairly mature project with roughly 65,000 stars on GitHub as of April 2017.

AngularJS

AngularJS is a tool that was created and maintained by Google. Like ReactJS, Google uses AngularJS in many oftheir own projects and it has been around since October 2010. Angular is also very mature and popular with roughly 23,000 stars on github as of April 2017

Features

AngularJS and ReactJS are similar in some ways but very different in other ways. Out of the box, AngularJS has many more features than ReactJS.

AngularJS provides a ton of features for modern application development out of the box, such as:

• Dependency injection
• Templates (based on extended HTML)
• Routing
• Ajax request tools
• Cross-site Scripting protection
• Unit Testing Tools
• CSS Component encapsulation
• Tools for building forms

ReactJS provides a simpler more minimal set of features, such as:

• Cross-site Scripting protection
• Templates (based on an XML like language)
• Unit Testing Tools
• No Dependency Injection

Although ReactJS doesn’t provide much by default, there are many libraries that you can combine with it. Some examples include tools to provide: routing, CSS encapsulation, unit testing, Fetch API libraries, etc.

Library vs Framework

AngularJS is much more a framework than a library. Whereas ReactJS is much more a library than a framework. AngularJS provides many pre-made tools and components that are robust and ready to use for building a full web application. ReactJS is much less complex. ReactJS is much more of a library that helps with with certain aspects in developing a web application. Two of the most important aspects are: (1) JSX - enables HTML quotes, use of HTML tags for sub-component rendering, and helps with building code for complex components and (2) Reduces DOM Operations - helps minimize the number of DOM operations that need to be done and speed up the update process. ReactJS uses a Virtual DOM. The DOM is an in-memory representation of the HTML text. The Virtual DOM is an abstratction of the HTML DOM. It is easier to manipulate and to understand.

Conclusion

ReactJS and AngularJS provide very different solutions for web application development. Neither one can be considered the better solution. The best solution depends upon the developer’s needs and the application’s goals and constraints. In summary, AngularJS provides something of a skeleton from which to build an application on and ReactJS provides tools to improve on specific parts of an application.